Wednesday, 29 October 2014

I am currently steeped in German Romantic poetry – in
particular Schiller, Schulze, Mayrhofer, Hölty, Heine, Müller
and the Schlegel brothers ‒
preparing for concerts in Oxford filled with Schubert’s settings of their work.

This brought to mind one of those forks in the road that
confront us from time to time. I was working very happily for Garland-Compton
in its pre-Saatchi days, running our biggest client, Rowntree.

They had
recently taken over a leading competitor, Mackintosh’s, and the brilliant,
glamorous young Tony Mackintosh had become leader of their merged European
division.

Tony would sweep into our offices in Charlotte Street,
brought there in his black-chauffeur-driven white limo, a vision, all blue
jeans and fur coat. The latter he would hand immediately to our receptionist,
she on the verge of meltdown, and ask for me.

It was all very 1969.

In due course, Tony summoned me to his offices – not in
Halifax or Norwich or York, where the major factories and offices were (and
are), but in a fine Georgian house in Park Lane, Mayfair. There he invited me
to leave the agency and join his team in a senior marketing role. I was
flattered, of course, but turned him down ‒ graciously, I hope.

At one point in the meeting, we discussed European
languages. The plain fact is that, although I have some words and phrases in
most of them, I am reasonably fluent only in English.

“How's your German?” he asked.

“Well, I’m familiar with a good deal of Romantic poetry,” I
said, “but I’m not sure that the vocabulary would be very useful in marketing
meetings.”

Sunday, 26 October 2014

To Oxford again, latest in the Schubert lieder recitals.
This time it was the wonderful baritone, Sir Thomas Allen, singing the great song
cycle, Die Winterreise – the Winter’s Journey.

Schubert set this tragic series of poems by his
contemporary, Wilhelm Müller. Although the composer admired Müller’s work
immensely, he only set one of his poems as a single song, ‘Der Hirt auf dem
Felsen’, the Shepherd on the Rock. But he set two long series by the poet which together established the song-cycle
as a major form within music – Die Schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreisse.

Curiously, although I’ve known the Winter's Journey intimately from recordings
over several decades, it was the first time I’d heard it in the flesh. And what
an ideal introduction this was by Thomas Allen. He brings a lifetime of
experience to it, not just of singing and acting, but also of life itself.

The journey starts with a young man, disappointed in love,
and ends with him observing an aged street musician, an organ-grinder:

There behind the village,
stands a hurdy-gurdy man,
with stiff fingers,
he plays as best he can.

Barefoot on the ice,
he staggers to and fro,
and his little plate
remains empty for ever.

No one wants to hear him,
no one looks at him,
and the dogs are growling
around the old man.

Thursday, 23 October 2014

Everyone associates Saatchi & Saatchi with Mrs Thatcher
and the Conservative Party, but in fact Garland Compton, in the days before it
became Saatchis, pitched and won the business in the run-up to one or other of
the previous 1974 elections. Both were effectively won by Labour, so it’s not
surprising that there’s no residual memory.

But I recall the pitch. It was one of the most frightening
experiences of my life. The great and good of the party, led by the terrifying
Lord Carrington, were lined up in front of me, waiting for my words of wisdom.
I hyperventilated, scarcely able to get a word out.

How on earth did we win the work? I've no idea.

Afterwards, I told one or two people what had happened to me
and got consistent advice, best summed up as: ‘You’d probably be better off not
doing presentations. Stick to what you’re good at, whatever that is.’

Of course, that made me determined to get better at
presenting – and at dealing with my nerves in such scary situations.

Monday, 20 October 2014

The recent serialisation of Lord Tim Bell’s memoirs in the Daily Mail with
its exposé of the ‘backstabbing, booze and screaming rows’*, put me in mind of
the difficult time I had had in leaving the firm.

At thirty-one, I’d come to the conclusion that, to get experience as a CEO
in the advertising business, I needed to leave Saatchi and Saatchi, the hottest
agency on the planet at that time.

I had found another, smaller, agency that was looking for someone to succeed
the dashing Rupert Chetwynd as MD. And they wanted me to do that.

Back at Saatchi, I was quite surprised, when I told Tim Bell of my plans,
that he didn’t follow my reasoning at all. In fact they wanted me to stay.
And so I found myself in the presence of the legendary Charles Saatchi.

What would it take to keep me at Saatchi’s? The offers came thick and fast.
Salary increases, trains, boats, planes. Anything you like. Oh, and by the way
we’d like you to be managing director.

The problem with that offer was that the agency already had a whole raft of
people called chairmen, deputy chairmen, managing directors, deputy MDs and so
on. I couldn’t see that becoming MD would have any reality to it. So I declined
his kind offer as graciously as I could.

As I was leaving his office, Charles stopped me: “I’d just like to say one
thing to you… It won’t be as easy out there.”

How right he was. In those days, winning business at Saatchi’s was a walk in
the park.

Friday, 17 October 2014

Academics the world over remain sniffy about Wikipedia. Yet
it is undoubtedly one of the greatest and most valuable triumphs of the
internet.

What prompted this thought was a rekindling of interest in
the extraordinary life of Misia Sert. Born in 1872, she was a pianist (her
teacher Gabriel Fauré),
who married three times. She was a close friend of the impresario Diaghilev and
became the cultural arbiter in Paris for several decades.

Proust enshrined her in two ways in his In Search of Lost
Time: as Princess Yourbeletieff (sponsor of the Ballets Russes) and as the
gruesome Madame Verdurin.

All this one can learn from the Wikipedia entry on Misia,
which I note has doubled in length and acquired a dozen footnotes since I last
googled it.

Ah well. Academia has been known to give the impression of catching
up with the rest of the world – sometimes at a distance of twenty years or so…

Tuesday, 14 October 2014

How blessed we are, to live near Oxford. Smaller than
London, Paris or New York, but nevertheless with so much going on.

This month the city hosts a three-week festival – all the
songs of Schubert. Over 650 of them.

It’s an amazing feat, the brainchild of pianist-impresario
Sholto Kynoch, who has organised (and performed in) his Oxford Lieder Festival
since its inception. Most of the events are at Holywell – not a ‘concert hall’,
but an intimate ‘music room’ with ideal acoustics. Opened in 1748, is it the
oldest public music venue in the world?

And the performers this year – a dazzling array of the
finest singers of German song, including Sir Thomas Allen, Wolfgang Holzmair,
Sarah Connolly, Angelika Kirschlager, Ian Bostridge, Robert Holl and so many more.
Plus the finest pianist-accompanists.

I caught up with it at lunchtime yesterday – a recital of
Schubert’s songs to poems by the brothers Schlegel. I was looking forward to
the soprano Kate Royal, who was wonderful, as expected, but the revelation was
the young Swiss baritone Manuel Walser (above), a pupil of Thomas Quasthoff. What
an artist!

Was this his debut in Britain? It seems so. Such a future he
has before him.

Saturday, 11 October 2014

One of the most popular consultant visuals is the one that
divides the topic in hand into things we know we know, things we know we don’t
know, things we don’t know we know, and things we don’t know we don’t know.
It’s a useful diagnostic tool.

Of course, there’s another category, not captured by the
graph, but neatly expressed by the American cowboy Will Rogers (or was it wise
Mark Twain?):

It's not the things you don't know what gets you into
trouble. It's the things you do know that just ain't so.

Sunday, 5 October 2014

To Symphony Hall in Birmingham for the Australian Chamber
Orchestra on tour. Perfect programme, brilliantly played.

What could be more delicious than this: one of Haydn’s most
scintillating symphonies, the 'Hen', written for Paris; Mozart at his most
profound, his last piano concerto, beautifully played by Steven Osborne; a
brand new work by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, post-Pendereckian, wonderfully
atmospheric in that hall, and with the composer on stage with the band playing
an amplified sitar; and Tchaikovsky at his most joyfully ecstatic, his Souvenir
de Florence.

The ACO really isn’t just another chamber orchestra. They are
world-class and have a very distinct character ‒ energetic yet soulful, standing to play, swaying,
absolute unity, all in black. Tremendous audience reaction.

So what’s the problem? The hall was maximum 15% occupied.
Maybe less. Acres of empty space.

Thursday, 2 October 2014

That’s golfer Jamie Donaldson’s response to having played
the final winning shot for the European team at the Ryder Cup on Sunday.

‘It’s not sunk in yet…’

That’s what sportsmen and women say
when they achieve some important milestone. All of them. It’s become the
standard cliché. And
usually in answer to the same question, ‘How does it feel…?’

But what does it really mean?

‘I’ve been working very hard and don’t know how to access my
feelings at this point’?

‘I don’t have any feelings now, but I might later’?

‘That’s such a stock question, so here’s a stock answer’?

When they say it, I always wonder how it will be different
when it has finally ‘sunk in’, and how they might recognise that that moment
has arrived..

When it finally has 'sunk in', is the feeling usually better or worse than
in the immediate aftermath? I suppose the expectation is that it will be
better, but, for example with silver medal winners, research shows that it’s
worse – and probably, sadly, from the outset.

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Welcome

When I started this blog, the posts were mainly about innovation, creativity and leadership matters. So if you want the see those, they are mostly in the earlier years. More recently I've been writing about the arts - music, literature and art itself. I still post from time to time on innovation matters and indeed anything else that intrigues me.

About Me

Roger Neill FRSA, FIoD, is Managing Partner of the innovation consultancy, Per Diem. He was Founding Director of the Centre for Creativity, City University London, and international managing partner for Synectics Corporation, a world leader in innovation and creativity. He writes, speaks and conducts masterclasses and workshops around the world.
Previously Roger worked in marketing communications. For ten years he was with Saatchi & Saatchi and was appointed to the board of directors aged 27. With Lintas (now Lowe) he became chairman in Australia/New Zealand and regional director for Asia/Pacific. He was deputy chairman of WCRS Worldwide in London. Roger was World President of the International Advertising Association 1990-1992.
An expert on the innovators, artists, writers and musicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he helped Sam Wanamaker to re-build Shakespeare's Globe in London. He curated the exhibition Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett for the National Portrait Gallery in Australia. Roger was founder of Sinfonia 21 and chairman of Endymion Ensemble. He started his working life as a professional rock musician.